The basic idea of this publication is to present the development of my most important groups of works since
2003. I also included those pieces that only existed for
one exhibition or are no longer completely available in
the original arrangement.

The title I selected - “Case Studies/Fallstudien” – is
supposed to highlight the many different layers of my
work. The authors selected for the accompanying essays also reflect my working principle.
This book was motivated by a specific occasion and it
is also guided by a particular theme. I have sought to
actively develop artistic responses to different situations
and contexts.

In his work Eric Kressnig has adopted a conceptual
approach that is often associated with concrete art.
This comparison with similar artistic strategies not only
points to the diversity of a ‘faction’ in contemporary art
production. It also sheds light on the various nuances of
the issues the artist focuses on. For instance, an exhibition with the unwieldy title “Reality and Abstraction 2 –
Concrete and Reductive Tendencies Since 1980”, which
took place at the Liaunig, a Carinthian private museum,
in the summer of 2012, showed Eric Kressnig’s work in
the setting from which it seems to stem – and it is here
that its subtle qualities become particularly noticeable.
Here one could see pioneers of classical modernism,
many internationally known big names of concrete
art and an impressing number of contemporary artists
from Austria. The ‘pioneers’ included Josef Albers, Sol
LeWitt and Pierre Soulages and the ‘stars’ of the international scene Imi Knoebel, Tony Cragg and Heinz Mack.
Among the Austrians one found – to the extent that
regional references make any sense at all in recent art
production – next to the many big artists also Hildegard
Joos, Helga Philipp, Heinz Gappmayr, Richard Kriesche,
Heimo Zobernig, Karl Prantl, Hans Kupelwieser, Jakob Gasteiger, Brigitte Kowanz, Peter Kogler and Eva
Schlegel.
The exhibition featured two large canvases by
Kressnig, which were hung across from two pieces by
Karl Hikade and next to an object by Michael Kienzer.
Kressnig’s work was well positioned in this context,
which proved useful for comparing the artist’s thematic
thrust with related strategies. It is not an art for the
superficial beholder. You have to be able to understand
and relate to a meticulous, sometimes still ironic working method, which requires a heightened perception

from the viewer. To grasp this art more is needed than
a hasty, superficial gaze. Kressnig’s formal repertory is
geometric through and through. Yet this alone does not
say much, since – as we saw above – there is an entire
cosmos of constructive art that addresses very different
issues. Indeed this sphere of art production shows so
many different styles and techniques, even ‘signatures’
as the other, expressive, painterly - ‘realistic’ - group.

ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES, IRRITATIONS
The difference between both “expressive families”
lies not only in their notion of individuality and authenticity, those basic categories of modernism, but rather in
the type of artistic sensitivity. The issue is which perceptions and events stimulate the artist and bring on an
impulse, which then manifests itself in art production.
For many artists, this can be the sensual surfaces and
bodies of individuals, animals or plants. For others it can
be the world of consumer objects that provide inspiration for the production of artistic metaphors and models
of trash culture. And then there are other artists who
are fascinated by the endless combinations of the most
elementary signs, forms and materials, the possibilities
of constructing a separate, almost autonomous artistic
world out of these civilizational particles. And only almost, since inherent to almost all of these works is a socalled “reference to reality”, since either the provenance
of formal elements or the context of the work conveys
such references to the everyday world.
The impulses described last could, of course, be associated with Kressnig. In his case, it could be certain
material qualities that activate his creative motor of
association or even spatial structures. This sounds abstract but it actually triggers off a very concrete working
process. An example: For an installation at Carinthia’s
Museum of Modern Art Kressnig took the ground plan
as his point of departure. He set about working with
a pencil and a ruler, beginning with the white wall of

the museum over which he placed a fine grid of lines.
In regular intervals he added, in the somewhat thicker
lines of the grid, abstract variants of the museum’s floor
plan. However, he did not cover the entire wall with
these signs of a perimeter block development featuring an inner courtyard and only worked with a U- or
G-shaped surface. This large figure composed of the
sum total of all variants of the small form, alludes, in
turn, to the ground plan structure of the museum. The
artist distills and varies a formal system from an existing
structure that is not perceived as art which has to do
with everyday experience (representation of the building) and reflects the largely autonomous structure – a
subtle fusion of various levels and scales of reality in the
artwork. Kressnig has found a nice way to describe this
pervasive interdependence of all levels of art and reality:
“Each completes the other and is completed by the
other.”
It would, however, be wrong to assume that a
hermetic order has been thus constructed – one from
which there is no escape. Quite the contrary: Kressnig
lives subtle irritations, and sometimes he even deliberately asks: “How can I disrupt a system?” Of course, this
is nothing destructive, and it is not the destruction of
a given formal law, which undoubtedly exerts a certain
fascination. Rather, it is, as noted above, a subtle irritation. For this one could also cite some examples, like
the series of colored pencil drawings, in which simple
geometric shapes govern one’s first impression. There
are irregular squares, arrow forms, triangles and the like.
They are situated in a precisely drawn frame consisting of pencil lines that come together in the corners.
Even their own outline has been precisely drawn with a
pencil. Their inner surface, however, shows the irritations mentioned before. These have been executed as a
strangely whirring texture of parallel lines drawn close
together with a colored pencil in various intervals and
in various shades of color. The nuances have been finely
coordinated – either there are shades of yellow-brown
or sounds of red and blue, elegantly placed over the

surface like a carpet with a tightly woven thread structure. Yet – and here’s where the irritation lies! – the colored parallel lines are not oriented after the outer edges
of the triangles and rectangles but have been slightly
tilted at a minimum angle. Thus a sort of unclear zone
emerges on the inner side of the contour lines – where
the “order” of the picture begins to slip and the hatching moves towards the edge without being able to
actually hook up with it.

WHAT IS A PICTURE? WHAT IS PAINTING?
Kressnig pursues this play with systems, their order
and irritation, with material qualities and their inversion
in a great variety of techniques and media. The artist’s
media portfolio ranges from drawing, print graphic and
the canvas to objects. In the exhibition at the Liaunig
Museum described at the beginning of this text there
were two object-like acrylic paintings set in extremely
deep wedge frames. Instead of the usual thickness of
a few centimeters, theses paintings are 14 cm thick,
which gives them a box-like look. This is the artist’s first
step towards a radical anti-illusionism, which does not
interpret the painting as a depiction of this world or
another one but rather reveals an autonomous entity
of material and proportions, which develops its own
regularities. The elements of the resulting object are
painstakingly separated and then presented to the
viewer in an orderly fashion. The picture surface is
the first element – an unprimed natural canvas whose
sensual haptic quality is enhanced in an almost ironic
way by means of a “deeper” wedge frame. The second
element lies on this surface, namely the painted picture
– a thin layer of paint. To make it easier to recognize the
quality of this layer, the painted surface is revealed – to
the left, top and to the right a very narrow strip remains
free between painted surface and the outer edge of the
painting so that the canvas is visible here (in slapdash
publications of these paintings this frame is left out.) On
the lower edge the unpainted strip is broader, almost a
fifth of the painting’s height.

Yet what is a painting, what is painting in a more
general sense? Painting is a composition of colors and
shapes that can be related to each other in certain proportions. In order to visualize it is best to take the most
basic and clearest shape – a square. Like shapes the
colors also have to be brought close to the zero point –
for this Kressnig uses a very limited palette of shades of
gray and bluish-green. The third element of painting is
proportion. And even in this category Kressnig offers the
most fundamental solutions: The ground or horizontal
line is identical with the boundary between painted and
non-painted parts of the canvas. In one picture the rectangular shapes standing on it create a square through
the horizontal sequence, thus offering a basic presentation of static form. However, in the second picture the
rectangles that are lined up next to each other extend
in a quasi ‘dynamic’ way over the entire picture. The
proportion of this field (ca. 1.2) corresponds almost exactly to that of that of the canvas – tilted by 90 degrees,
alluding to the fact that it could also work the other
way around. Kressnig has actually continued this intelligent series of paintings with horizontal stripes as well.
Thus these canvases can also be seen as a commentary
on the possibilities of painting and the picture – but
not necessarily. One can also enjoy the elegant accords
of color, the precise construction and the meticulous,
evenly thin layer of acrylic paint. Kressnig’s works are
endowed with both an intellectual and a sensual layer –
they are both: action and reflection.

SPELLING ART
Kressnig is interested in working with the basic
categories of artistic production on all levels and in a
number of dimensions. While he was in Salzburg on a
Rudolf Hradil graphic grant he also experimented with
lithography. Here he created several series which, as
was to be expected, addressed the basic structures of
the medium. This also included format. In the history

of lithography several standards have evolved, as for
instance, the “Baslerstab” – a stone measuring 37 x 49
cm. Kressnig literally spells the structures of the medium
by printing monochrome surfaces in pastel shades on
top of which he has placed black type for maximum
contrast. The word “Stab” (bar) appears several times
on the sheet slightly off kilter. Or there are several
monochrome surfaces without a further motif, printed
on top of each other so they appear offset, which results
in interesting accords in hues of gray-green-yellow. As
a reference to a specific location Kressnig once again
includes a ground plan – which this time is the Salzburg
Ursuline Church by Fischer von Erlach, whose strikingly
triangular ground plan stands alone on the sheet as
an abstract motif, now thickened and blurred through
the reproduction process. For the final exhibition of his
study stay Kressnig printed posters that consistently
address the most fundamental irritations which the
medium – printed letters – is capable of. In the reproduction process they can be misprinted so that what is
printed appears offset on the sheet – a classical misprint.
And in the type the most fundamental error is that of
the distorted position of the letters – Kressnig’s posters
show this precisely – letters that were misprinted and
turned 90 degrees that only allude succinctly to the
content and to nothing else: “KRESSNIG IM TRAKLHAUS
MON 5. DEZ 18.00”
It is clear that an artist with these interests deals
intensively with the phenomenon of type letters. This
minimal signifier of the smallest unit is not just fascinating because of its linguistic-semantic function. It
is also a formal element. And the combination of a
‘given’ form with a diversity of contents, especially in a
‘molecular’ level, is of course a big challenge for Kressnig. His answer to this phenomenon is the template
as the individual linguistic molecules are reproduced
identically in everyday use. They can also – to further
simplify them- be stripped of their irregular, curved elements and reduced to rectangular shapes. This is precisely what Kressnig does, thereby creating a separate

type that is in a sense paradox. By eliminating the
“individual” dimension of writing – italics, serifs, drops
– and replacing it with “neutral” geometry, it creates
a sort of art-writing which, however, was the artist’s
invention. The subjective thus becomes the objective
and vice versa. Such inversions fascinate Kressnig and
he continues them in a logical way on the formal level,
by painting pictures on canvas using his type templates. The letters are arranged horizontally along the
middle axis of the picture – already this first decision
regarding composition is geared to creating inversion
effects, since it suggests a horizontal reflection possibility. In addition, the upper half of the picture is gray
and the lower is white – and in the second painting
it is the opposite. This homogenous background in
turn requires that the type, depending on the area in
which its parts stand, must be inverted, that is have
the opposite color of the ground since it would otherwise disappear in it. The result is semantically confusing, since the type is hardly legible, but the structure
resulting from this is rhythmic and beautiful. So what
we have is a new paradox inversion – semantic vagueness results from formal clarification and reduction but
on an aesthetic level this vagueness manifests itself as
clarity and beauty. It could be seen as representing a
classical philosophical triad between the material, the
sublime and the beautiful. In addition to these obvious
aspects these unassuming pictures also have a number
of less striking qualities that attest to the vibrancy of
the artist’s paintings. The color surfaces are not completely uniform – the gray is not just gray but also yellowish, just as the white is. The edges of the painting
are underscored through a narrow strip on the frame,
which is painted in the respective complimentary color
of the given area. And the canvases are also painted on
the side of the wedge frame –as a “continuation” of
the front side in the color of the related section of the
painting.

FROM A CLOSED TO AN OPEN SYSTEM
Kressnig’s method becomes particularly visible in
a very unassuming series of drawings that the artist
created while on a study trip in Frankfurt. The artist
refers to it as an “open system of 8 sheets”. Here one
doesn’t see much, only a parallelogram-like shape made
of black lines. Two horizontal parallel lines on the top
and bottom – in between there are nine slanted lines
that, however, do not touch all of the horizontal sides.
For instance, in one sheet of the series the horizontal
lines are too short to be able to meet the outermost
slanted vertical lines on the left-hand and right-hand
side. These simple shapes strike the viewer as so bereft
of meaning that while searching for visual stimuli one is
literally forced to take a closer look at the sensual-haptic
structure of the works. So this way one discovers the
irregular application of the strokes, their soft ends, with
some of the surface covered with thicker line and even
some small surfaces left empty. But somehow it does
not look as if they were drawn with a soft pencil and a
ruler. Indeed, it is a “mediatized” drawing since it was
pressed on paper with the classical transparent carbon
paper. This imprint is in turn not a creative act of drawing but a sculptural one, which explains why Kressnig
says: “This is microscopic sculpture.”
The minimal deviation turns the closed system
into an open one. This is one of the basic elements of
Kressnig’s approach. It is also a symbol for freedom and
endless artistic imagination. The clearer and stricter
the system is, the more dramatic the deviation from
it seems to be. In the exhibition in Carinthia in 2012,
described above, another piece, one by Michael Kienzer
was also on display next to the two paintings by Kressnig. A number of boards, like those used industrially
for interior construction (wood fiber, pressboard, glass,
etc.) lie here, stacked in any odd way on the floor. On a
side edge of these rectangular boards there is a further
board made out of the same material standing upright,
glued down, so that a sort of sculptural spatial corner is
created with the angled wood joints, the board leaning

on the wall. This is what makes this wall figure different
from an outdoor sculpture, which would stand freely in
a space. The slightly tilted leaning on the wall is, however, also a contradiction to the square connection of the
boards. If it were really a right angle, the object would
not be able to lean on the wall and become a freely
standing sculpture. The title of the piece is thus “18 x
95 degrees”. That is 95 degrees and not 90 degrees. A
wall figure, not a freely standing sculpture. Kressnig is
drawn to such tightrope walks. His canvases in the same
space are both sculpture and painting, their composition is at once static and dynamic. That is to say, an
artistic system, which begins to move through slight
changes and opens up. The precondition for the discovery of these facts is precision, consistency and curiosity.
Classical artist’s qualities, which Kressnig certainly has
no lack of.